Friday, January 21, 2011

Domain Driven Design Immersion

I've been meaning to write about my experience at the Domain Driven Design Immersion training that I took back in November. But, I've been so busy that I haven't had the time to put down my thoughts on it properly until today. First off, I had a great time; met many wonderful and intelligent people; and learned quite a few new techniques. Just given that, it was well worth the time. The course was simply fantastic.

I read Domain-Driven Design when it first came and fell in love with it. I've read it several times and consider it one of the greatest books on design. It's a tome of knowledge on being practical in design and getting closer to mapping user language to code. There are no silver bullets, just great advice and a road map of thought to get there. Despite the book being well-written, there were questions I've had when applying DDD throughout the years. I jumped at the chance to spend a week immersed in DDD and learn a few more tricks.

The training was excellent: well-paced, interactive, and loads of discussion. DDD is something that you must practice and the training provides a lot of it. From hands on coding to white board design sessions, you get your mind in the middle of the whole process. The trainers guided discussion and encouraged us to be creative in our solutions: messy whiteboards are good! I've been to a lot of training and seminars. Normally, little thought was given to pacing of the material. This was not the case with DDD Immersion. I felt there was an excellent mix of lecture, hands-on, and discussions. Each day felt like it went by too fast. Four days is not a lot of time to cram the amount of material that the DDD book covers, but the course materials provided abbreviated documents to bullet point the important ideas. I personally thought the materials made the course all worth it.

Even if you have read the DDD book, I still think the training is worth it's weight in gold. I work with Eric on his Time and Money library and I still got new ideas out of it. The training does add new material to the book and expands on Eric's new ideas concerning DDD.

The one thing that I took from the training is it's all about practicing to get better at design. Eric has laid out a path of thought on design. It still takes ingenuity and playing around with ideas to be successful. Design is a creative process and it takes hard thinking to match the language of users into code. The training brings that home. I whole heartily recommend the training and would go again given the chance. The real world keep giving me problems where questions arise to the best way to tackle them. You can never stop learning.